Mathias Jean Johansen

2015 in Review

This post is simply a reminder to myself of all the great things that have
happened during 2015.

Highlights

In many ways, 2015 was a year of JavaScript to me. I visited my first
conference, ReactEurope, and went to a React
hackathon at the Mozilla office in Paris. In addition, I spent countless hours
learning Flow, and implementing it into our existing
code base at work. I also familiarized myself with the wonders of
Babel, and ECMAScript 2015, and I learned to apply, and
appreciate the ideas behind JSON schemas.

I submitted, and successfully defended my bachelor’s
thesis.
This is possibly the most challenging work I’ve accomplished so far. It is an
implementation of a lazy, functional programming language which can be
executed on two, separate stack machines that perform lazy evaluation using
two different strategies. It consists of a compiler written in OCaml, and the
aforementioned stack machines written in C. The source code is available on
GitHub, although sufficient documentation
is still severely lacking.

Books read

Compared to 2014, I’ve read far fewer books in 2015 than I wanted to both in
terms of fiction, and technical books. In 2016, I hope to delve into Tropic of
Capricorn, Flaubert, and ideally also SICP which has been on my to-read list
since the beginning of 2014. These are the books I completed in 2015 in
chronological order:

I have a slight feeling that 2016 will include working with
Relay, and
GraphQL. If time permits it, it would be
interesting to dabble in Rust,
Idris, Racket, and
Elixir, or even notably older programming languages
as Prolog, and
Forth.

Hopefully, I’ll have more time to practice music too, and perhaps travel a bit
as well. I’d also be fun to revisit my bachelor’s thesis, and refine the
language. I might give an update on the state of affairs next year. We’ll see.